“You mean Captain Jorgenson? Oh, he refused at first. He said that he had your orders.”
“How on earth did you manage to get round him?” said Lingard in his softest tones.
“I did not try,” she began and checked herself. Lingard's question, though he really didn't seem to care much about an answer, had aroused afresh her suspicion of Jorgenson's change of front. “I didn't have to say very much at the last,” she continued, gasping yet a little and feeling her personality, crushed to nothing in the hug of those arms, expand again to its full significance before the attentive immobility of that man. “Captain Jorgenson has always looked upon me as a nuisance. Perhaps he had made up his mind to get rid of me even against your orders. Is he quite sane?”
She released her firm hold of that iron forearm which fell slowly by Lingard's side. She had regained fully the possession of her personality. There remained only a fading, slightly breathless impression of a short flight above that earth on which her feet were firmly planted now. “And is that all?” she asked herself, not bitterly, but with a sort of tender contempt.
“He is so sane,” sounded Lingard's voice, gloomily, “that if I had listened to him you would not have found me here.”
“What do you mean by here? In this stockade?”
“Anywhere,” he said.
“And what would have happened then?”
“God knows,” he answered. “What would have happened if the world had not been made in seven days? I have known you for just about that time. It began by me coming to you at night—like a thief in the night. Where the devil did I hear that? And that man you are married to thinks I am no better than a thief.”
“It ought to be enough for you that I never made a mistake as to what you are, that I come to you in less than twenty-four hours after you left me contemptuously to my distress. Don't pretend you didn't hear me call after you. Oh, yes, you heard. The whole ship heard me for I had no shame.”